Monday, July 22, 2013

Head Desk Moments

I've run into some issues with one of the books I'm writing. I love the characters and the basic plot, but it needs some time marinating while I figure out how to shake up some of the things that need to be shaken.

That's not the problem. I'm good with letting books sit and simmer while I work on something else. My problem is that in my head, this is Book #1 in my Blue Moose series so it has to be done first.

Um. No.

It has to be first in the mini-series of 4 books that revolve around that family, but there's no reason it has to be the very first.

This thought totally surprised me this morning. One of the other three stories swirling around in my head could easily be Book #1. Talk about a Head Desk moment.

It's weird when my fictional world becomes so real that it surprises me that I can change things. Until it's published, nothing is written in stone. So, today I'm dabbling with another possible Book #1 and loving it.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who gets a little blindsided by these types of things!

Yes, I have totally had moments like this, where the solution to an "insurmountable" problem is actually quite simple -- if you approach it from a different direction.

I've even had cases where a scene wasn't working and the dialogue didn't fit the characters, but I needed these things said ... and I realized that if I changed which characters said which lines (almost without changing the lines!) it suddenly came all together!!

That's so true. I had a similar experience. I was thinking about how the first few paragraphs of a chapter weren't exciting enough, and I didn't know how to make them more exciting, and then it hit me that I could totally start the chapter elsewhere. And it was like this huge revelation.